3b: Individual Reflection

This group project was a great learning experience in that I was able to spend time learning about an industry that I’ve never really thought about before.

I’ve traveled extensively and have seen artisans at tourist sites and in cities but never gave much thought to how their experience as sellers might be improved through working with a US based company. Through this project I was able to spend time trying to look through the viewpoint of indigenous artisans and think about how their selling might be more sustainable and beneficial.

As I’ve mainly had experience in more technologically heavy industries and products, it was difficult to initially think about how to grow an offline, more traditional business of simply reselling goods. At the beginning of the project, our group had trouble pinpointing both who the customers were (we decided we had two customers, consumers we sold to and craftspeople we sourced from) and what the problems we could solve were. Instead of simply getting more users or revenue we thought a big problem we could find a solution would be to improve the lives of our craftspeople. I feel like this kind of social aspect isn’t taught or talked about enough in general and exploring this aspect was a very good learning experience for me.

Talking to our mentor, Rekha, was very helpful as she made it really clear that to improve something, you first have to really know your customer. This seems simple in retrospect but we had essentially been bypassing this. She also told us that ecommerce was a lot more difficult that what it seems like as we would have to have the capacity to actually fulfill the orders. Subsequently, she gave the feedback that changing the product offerings or even the product experience for the products already offered might have a big impact. Her experience in product management really stood out to me!

As a group, I think we had some trouble in terms of individual motivation, communication, and expectation but looking back on it now, I think it was a good learning opportunity as I’ve experienced it (albeit to a lesser extent) in real life.